When deploying wireless communication networks, there is a balance between coverage and capacity. On the one hand, a few large cells can provide great coverage but at a cost of reduced capacity. On the other hand, a scenario with many small cells creates better capacity and throughput, but may not provide the desired coverage. Hence, there is often a combination of larger cells to provide sufficient coverage with smaller cells to provide better capacity.
However, providing coverage indoors using many small cells can be quite costly, with a radio base station for each such small cell. Moreover, when the cells get too small, wireless terminals moving in the network cause a great number of handovers which causes significant signalling overhead.
One solution to this problem is to use remote radio heads, where several remote radio heads connected to the same radio base station share the same cell. In this way, a single radio base station can provide coverage e.g. in different parts of a building, by placing the remote radio heads appropriately. Moreover, the wireless device can move between the coverage of different remote radio heads while staying within the same cell, thus avoiding causing handovers.
This reduces the need for network planning and coverage measurements which is cumbersome and costly. Instead, when a coverage hole is discovered, this can be addressed by simply by adding remote radio heads rather than costly network optimisation procedures.
When adding remote radio heads, either during initial deployment or later, it would be useful to provide a splitter device to allow multiple remote radio heads to fan out from a single trunk cable. However, no such splitters are known and how to balance complexity and cost versus functionality in such a splitter device is not trivial.